Halloween carving

Test with a PIR sensor

This was 2021 and Halloween was approaching and we were going to carve our little pumpkins like the previous year, on that occasion I did some basic circuits to connect a 3V battery to some tiny LEDs I had bought, as shown below. The battery only lasted a couple hours.

Initial light up
These are the carvings from the previous year.

So this year we were going to carve some as well, but I wanted to increase the complexity of the circuit. We lived in an apartment building with a walkway right outside our window. So an idea came out, I had a Raspberry Pi kit that included some sensors, one of those is a Pir sensor (motion sensor) and wondered “it’d be cool if they only turn on when people pass by. So I took my raspberry and the sensor and started to do some research, trying to find a python code that could read the sensor through the GPIO of the Pi and then send the signal to turn the LEDs on.

I started to get some progress on that and while researching the sensor, I found out the actual sensor provides an analog signal so the Pi wasn’t even needed for what I was after and that speed up the process. I created a basic circuit that incorporated the Pir sensor and was done!.

Below you can find a video of the initial test and a couple of images of the setup.

This is how they looked from the walkway.
This is how they ended up after a few days in the window.

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